Lambda

Fully-managed Function-as-a-Service!

Essentials

• "Serverless" computing platform

  • There are servers, but we don't see them or concern ourselves with them.

• Serverless means that you run code without provisioning or managing servers.

  • So if you want to run code, you don't have to spin up an EC2 instance and install software, you can just create a "Lambda function", drop code in, and execute it

• Lambda allows you to configure the amount of resources (memory, CPU) available to your function

• You pay only for the compute time necessary (to the millisecond)

• By default, it is highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, elastic, and cost efficient

• Lambda integrates well with many other AWS services

• Current support languages supported:

  • Node.js

  • Java

  • C#

  • Python

  • Go

  • Ruby (New)

  • Custom Runtimes!!! (Bash on the end, but now pretty much any language you want!)

Lambda vs. EC2

• Generally you want to use Lambda when you want to run code that is in response to events such as:

  • Changes to S3 buckets

  • Updates to an Amazon DynamoDB table

  • Custom events generated by your application or devices

  • Kinesis Streams

Pricing & Costs

• First 1M requests/month - FREE!

  • $0.20 per 1M requests/month after

• First 400kkk GB-sec/month- FREE!

  • $16.67 per 1M GB-sec/month after

Implementation

• Lambda includes handler functions built into samples in which you define the event, context and callback.